


The Tile Room

by Potionsmstrs



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Men of Letters Headquarters, fandomnatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2018-01-08 17:19:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potionsmstrs/pseuds/Potionsmstrs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He found it a month ago. The bunker seemed endless, so he spent his spare time searching the rooms. This one was touching. Mind blowingly shocking, but touching nonetheless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tile Room

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the January Promt in /r/Fandomnatural on Reddit. 
> 
> Promt: Tiles

He found it a month ago. The bunker seemed endless, so he spent his spare time searching the rooms. This one was touching. Mind blowingly shocking, but touching nonetheless.

  
Dean called it the tile room. Other than small brass plaques, tiles are what the room entailed. When he first found it, he attempted to read the tiny brass plates. Some were barely legible while others were too tarnished to decipher anything. The ones he could make out had names, what he assumed were birth and death years, and a creature.

  
During his next grocery run, Dean picked up some steel wool, Brasso, work shop rags, and rubber gloves. He practiced several lame excses to feed to Sam about why he would need his privacy for the next few days. It turned out that he didn't need to come up with anything. While Dean was gone, Sam began the daunting task of scanning and archiving all the creature lore in the bunker. They both estimated that it would take at least five months if Sam worked almost non-stop.

  
Dean took his supplies to the tile room. He climbed a stepladder and scoured then polished the plaque above the tiles. He stepped back to admire his work.

  
"Fallen Hunters" shone brilliantly on the wall. He grinned proudly, then checked his watch. 0132; he didn't realize he spent that much time shining brass. With no cases on his plate, he would have the whole room gleaming bright in no time.

  
The next day, Dean woke with sore shoulders. He may be physically fit, but polishing is a whole different game than he was used to. The best way to handle it, however, is to work through the pain. He entered the tile room whistling Smoke On The Water. After he pulled out a fresh rag, rearranged the step ladder, and snagged a new pad of steel wool, he set up a small stereo and got to work.

 

* * *

  
Two weeks passed. Two weeks of good music, decent beer, and a few more bottles of Brasso. He didn't recognize the names, but he quickly figured out that they were hunters, those were indeed birth to death dates, and the type of creature that ended their life. He was touched that the Men of Letters would honor such people. His kind of people. On that fourteenth day, just over half way through his self appointed task, he moved on to the next plaque as normal. With good reason, he remembered what he was listening to when it happened. He was chuckling and singing along to Hellhound on my Trail by Robert Johnson. Dean noticed the irony of it: the first time he remembered dying was by hellhounds and there he was, listening to a song about it while he polished the memorials of other deceased hunters. "And the day keeps on remindin' me, there's a hellhound on my-"

  
That was when he moved onto the next plaque. He had pressed the steel wool onto it when it receeded into the tile, like the secret button it was. A section of tile wall swung back, creating a door. He cautiously stepped inside. It wasn't a very big room, but he knew what he had to do once he saw what was inside.

  
Not much was in the little room, but it would be enough. On a small table was a shallow tray containing metal stampers, a hammer, blank plaques, and brass pins. Now he could add his fallen family and friends' names to the tile room.

 

* * *

  
With one more tap of the hammer, he finished adding the last brass plate. There were five empty rows of tile on the right side of the room, so Dean added several names in those spots. John and Mary Winchester, Samuel and Deanna Campbell, Ellen and Jo Harvelle, Rufus Turner, Kevin Tran, and Robert Steven "Bobby" Singer to name a few. He would never admit to anybody, but a tear might have been shed when he engraved the names into the metal. Good memories and bad floated to the surface of his mind with each letter he tapped out.

  
He thought about the day his name would be added to the wall. If anybody was left alive to add it.


End file.
